Episode 43: Critical Minerals: Research on the Horizon

All right to just kind of let into my next question for you Carol You've been around the industry of a hot minute.

You've been here.

What six seven years Sorry I had to do it if Greg's gonna do it I'm gonna do it The next steps to getting let's use the AmeriCarbon technology and then we'll go over to you, Greg, kind of with the same question because without the partnership between North American and AmeriCarbon and everybody else, these projects don't happen.

What are your next steps to deploying this commercially?

Well, Arranging for the financing, which I think AmeriCarbon has, we've been doing a lot of work with introducing them to the banks and different things here and some of the financial opportunities through the Bank of North Dakota and the Clean and Sustainable and stuff.

And I think we're getting very close on that.

I'd say the next major step is to have a signed offtake agreement in hand.

all kinds of different partners that are interested in the material, in the coal tar pitch.

When you've got China that controls 90% of that, and we're using it all over the place in a lot of different industries, from common uses to very highly technical, we need to develop a domestic supply, and that's something that we do not have.

We used to have blast furnaces in this country, but we don't have them anymore.

That's why China controls it.

They still have the old-style blast furnaces, so they are producing coal tar pitch.

So that's the big next step and there is no shortage of potential off-takers.

It's which one is going to jump on the bandwagon first and go ahead and decide that they really want to buy the product from the first plant that is built.

So I'd say that that's the next big step is securing the off-take and hopefully before too long we can actually be turning some dirt over and constructing the first facility.

That would truly be exciting.

So, Greg, kind of to you on the commercial side of things, but before you get into how you're going to develop this commercially, I think it would be helpful for the audience to, I know we all know what coal tar pitch is used in, if you can kind of tell the folks what product slate the plant is going to be pumping out so they kind of know where these materials are used.

Yes.

So one of the actual challenges for us is there's such a demand in so many different markets.

So at first it was difficult for us to figure out where to concentrate because most of you probably don't even know what coal tar pitch is.

And six or seven years ago, I didn't know either.

It's used in a number of applications.

It's almost like it's almost like a cousin of graphite itself.

So a lot of times, if you use graphite to make a battery, there are, think of the structure of the graphite, kind of looks like if you've ever seen like an X-ray of a bone, how there's kind of like holes, almost like Swiss cheese.

Well, think of the pitch being used to go fill in those gaps in the graphite.